like sands through the hourglass....so are the days of bek #5

Wow, the last time I updated this little series was in January! Far too long ago I say. You can read the previous posts, here, here, here, and here.

High School. Dun dun dun duuuunnnn….

High School for me was a little tough. Year 8 was great. Thinking I was ‘all that’ because I was a teenager now and was in high school! Year 9 was spent looking down on all the Year 8’s who thought they were ‘all that’ and was mainly spent in the girls toilets. I used to ask my teacher if I could go to the toilet before recess and then would stay there till late afternoon. We had a couple of showers in our toilets and I used to hang off the shower curtain pole and walk up the wall, along the roof and back again for hours on end. This was of course spent with my best friend who was such a bad influence for the next few years. The one class I did turn up to was music. I loved music and was the teachers pet. You could not tear me away from that class no matter how hard you tried. I don’t remember learning anything else that year. Also while in Year 9, decided that witchcraft was the thing and I started to dabble in it quite a bit with my friend. I was so easily led along and I thought I was so cool being a rebel. Year 10 I had one too many freaky experiences with the whole witchcraft thing and decided to give it up. I got more involved in my school work and enjoyed sport a lot more. I stopped music because my teacher left the school and I couldn’t stand the new teacher and his style or should I say groove. I competed in a couple of running and high jump carnivals and really enjoyed myself. I started becoming good friends with a girl who happened to be the sport legend at our school. She held most swimming, running, athletic records at our school and I could never keep up with her. Just once I wanted to beat her in a sport, but I don’t think it ever happened. I beat her in my English and that’s about it. Not that our friendship was all about competing against each other, but it did start heading down that track. My favourite sport would have been the cross country and the high jump. Boy, did I love whipping off my skirt and parading around in my bummies (or as they say here in WA – bloomers) because I didn’t want to knock the pole off with my skirt (the school soon sorted that out by introducing shorts).

Year 11 our school decided to introduce the TEE system. Our class were the guinea pigs. In previous years the school had always run on the PACE system – learning at your own pace – in my opinion, this system was and is crap. We were so far behind all other schools and we were given a rude shock when we started TEE. I decided to only do English and Art as TEE subjects and for all the others I just did TAFE courses. Most of what I remember in Year 11 is that I was constantly told off and reprimanded in my Art class for "being too abstract" and to "just do it" normally – I thought art was supposed to be expressionistic!
Year 12 I dropped Art and kept up with my English. I found English to come naturally and didn’t really apply myself as much as I should have. I still passed, but I didn’t pass with any flair.

I wasn’t a prefect and I wasn’t considered anything special. I couldn’t get a boyfriend and I felt like the chick who had to make up for all her flaws with her humor. I was silly and outgoing and completely comfortable in my skin. I didn’t have mangos I had mosquito bites (if you get what I mean….boobs). I couldn’t wear a strapless dress to the ball like all the other girls ‘cos there wasn’t anything there to hold them up. And…stop reading if you’re a boy….I didn’t get a visit from Aunty Flow till the year out of school. You could say I was a late bloomer.

Boys….feel free to re-join :) I bet you didn’t stop reading anyway did you!?

I never really felt like I fitted in at anything at school. I wasn’t one of the pretty ones, I wasn’t one of the smart ones, I wasn’t one of the sporty ones, I wasn’t one of the musical ones (any more), and I wasn’t one of ‘the couples’. I was my own person. I didn’t care! I did my own thing. Said what I thought, thought about things after I did them and never backed down in a debate. I was passionate about what I deemed important and it wasn’t until I stopped hanging out with my friend from Year 9 that I got serious about God and became more involved genuinely at church and school. Our class put together Awakening ’01, the year we finished school. Awakening was something we did once a week during lunchtime and was a time of worship and prayer for high schoolers only. We got quite a regular crowd and people genuinely enjoyed it. At our graduation we handed over Awakening, and still today it is still going, currently Awakening ’07. Its nice to have a little memory still going at school from our class.

I didn’t have much of an idea of what I wanted to do career wise. I went on a couple of work experience placements and ended up deciding I would persue media. In Year 10 I went on work experience at Armadale Hospital. I desperately wanted to be a midwife (since I was 5 or something). I went into the labour ward for a couple of days and during the course of the week managed to pass out twice on my head nurse. After deciding it wasn’t for me I did a couple of other placements, cant remember all of them, and the last one I did was with the ‘Weekend Examiner’ a small newspaper based out of Armadale. I did really well and got quite a few stories published, and a couple with a by line - meaning at the top of the article it says By Rebekah Furlong. I really enjoyed this and decided I would continue with my English studies and head off to Uni, but thats a story for another time.

This has ended up being much longer than I thought and has sort of turned into something different to what I thought I would write about.

I guess high school really did a bit of shaping for me. I developed a sense of humor and a personality of being loud and abrupt and silly and chaotic all at once. I was secure in who I was but felt insecure in my standing with people. I was yet to go through a personality crisis….if you can have one at 18.